I grew up in the Midwest with an alchoholic mother, no father and a fiercely independent spirit. At 18, I defied the advice of virtually everyone who should have cared about me and left for school 1,000 miles away. I intended to return home eventually, but a funny thing happened on the way...
I ended up in an entirely new city, with an entirely new life, a great job, great friends, an adorable boyfriend and a whole new perspective. I also seem to have acquired a 15 year-old along the way...

Saturday, October 21, 2006

Along with Munchkin, Smoking Hot Roommate (SHR), (and her sister and father), is probably going to show up in just about every post I write. So she will get her own lengthy introduction post. Well, I guess the three of them will.

When I was a freshman, I lived in a dorm room with a girl who is now another of my very best friends. She also happens to be the single most attractive person I have ever seen in person…think Carmen Electra, only prettier and taller. I don’t have a cute nickname for her yet, but I will get one. I will also tell you about her someday because she is super cool and has a life story almost as random as mine (including a story about her name being weird like mine.) She lives in Los Angeles with another close friend and I miss her dearly…

Anyway, she immediately made friends with a girl who lived two rooms down from us…Smoking Hot Roommate. The only thing is: I didn’t actually like SHR…Hee hee. Don’t worry, I have told her this many times, so none of it is surprising. My rationale was that I thought she was a little snooty and a bit stuck up. In reality, I was just a tad bit jealous. I was a tiny, shy, poor kid in a strange place with all kinds of people around that were nothing like the people I grew up with, and here was this girl who was tall, and super confident in herself, and smart and funny and gorgeous and everyone wanted to be around her all the time. It was also apparent that she grew up in a somewhat different social stratosphere than I did (she had earrings worth more than the various houses I grew up in.)

So I didn’t like her. But then her boyfriend (now fiancé, sorry fellas) came to visit one weekend and I changed my mind.

I’m entitled, I’m a girl:-D.

What happened? Well, I sort if expected some guy named Chip with chiseled features, a complete wardrobe by Polo and stories of chartering his yacht around the Hamptons all summer. Turns out he is a complete dork. (Sorry buddy:-)) He is a dork in a super cute way, though…he is a dork like Seth on The OC or Jim from The Office. But…I spent an afternoon with him (the two hot chicks had something else they had to do) and realized that he is super nice, super sweet, really funny and uber-smart. I already knew the last part, he went to MIT.

They met in a wicked cute way, too. His mom used to clean SHR’s house, and SHR’s mom told her that instead of paying a babysitter, she should just bring her son along and he could play with SHR. Basically, they met in a sandbox when they were 3 and have been best friends since. How cute is that? So, my giant epiphany was that this girl who is so perfect and could have any boy she wanted picked one who really IS perfect for her, even if he may not look like it at first glance. I figured maybe I wasn’t giving her a fair shake, so I sort of re-assessed her. And good thing I did.

After that, me and SHR became really close really fast. We happen to be extremely similar, even if we have virtually no common background. I don’t think I have ever been even remotely angry with her about anything. We even had a trip home from the Bahamas once that took like 27 hours and had a bunch of delays and cancellations, but it was never that bad because we can just hang around together like that and it is always a good time. When we were sophomores, SHR and I lived in a triple with my freshman roommate (she needs a cute name…I will confer a bit and get one for her). Then when we were juniors and seniors we lived in an apartment together, some of the time with a fourth girl (who now lives in LA with freshman roommate).

After junior year, I came to Boston to live with SHR and her father for the summer, and to be an intern at her father’s company. One of the things that will become apparent as I write more, SHR’s dad is the closest thing I have ever had to a father. Not only has been extremely good and kind to me, but he has done the same for my sister (right down to having a room at their beach house made into a “Princess Room” for her when she moved here last summer to make her feel more welcome). When I get married someday, I will probably ask him to give me away. And in tribute, he gets the following catchy and cute nickname: Papa Bear. I just giggled to myself.

At the end of the summer, Papa Bear told me that if I took a couple of finance classes (I was a poli-sci major) that I could work there when I graduated. Since I really liked what we do and the people that work there, I decided that that was in fact a good idea, so I did it. The fact that he was willing to pay me WAAAAY more than I am worth was probably a factor in that decision as well. More on the job some other time…

But that is how I ended up in Boston. I decided to move here, work for Papa Bear and live with SHR after graduation. True to SHR being one of the nicest and most generous people around, when I found out my mother was dying and decided that I was going to take in Munchkin, she quickly jumped on board with the idea, and encouraged me to bring her to Boston (as opposed to staying in Chicago with her), despite the fact that it would obviously be a pretty large imposition on her. She is just really nice that way.

Smoking Hot Roommate has an older sister who is also one of my best friends, and who I totally aspire to be like. I am going to just go ahead and call her Big Sis. She is really similar to SHR only she swears a lot more…Lol. There is also a little of the mother-daughter relationship that Munchkin and I have, although not quite as dramatic. Both girls are super close to their father, but their mother died when SHR was 12 and Big Sis was 19. And like both SHR and Papa Bear, Big Sis has been extraordinarily generous to both me and Munchkin.

This post is too long for a blog…Lol…so I will wrap up with a story; the only time Papa Bear ever yelled at me. My biggest concern in bringing Munchkin to Boston was that I would be alone with all that responsibility (or so I thought, I was wrong). As WT as my (and Munchkin’s) families I Chicago are, at least they are there. If I stayed, there are a lot of aunts, uncles and cousins to share the burden of taking care of her. And the biggest thing I needed to look into was finding her a school. This is no small task…SHR had bought a condo in Boston, but the Boston Public School suck. So I would either need to live somewhere else and send her to public schools (probably in Brookline, which is a town near Boston and really close to downtown) or pay to send her to a private school in the city or near it. Neither of which was terribly appealing, or even feasible.

Papa Bear proposed a solution: there is a fantastic school about two blocks from SHR’s new condo. It is very small, extremely good and (this is big with kids) the combination of classes, sports, music, art and other extracurricular stuff keeps the kids at school from 8 am until 5 pm every day (it is not as bad as it sounds…lol…the “classes” run until like 12:30, and then after lunch is all the other stuff). I sort of knew that the place was absurdly expensive, but I went to see it because Papa Bear asked me to.

And it was everything that you could hope for. Top notch facilities, small class sizes, great teachers, etc. And they told me that, given her grades and her unique background, that they would make a spot for her in the fall. So I went back to Papa Bear and said “Great place, but I can’t afford it”. And he said that he wanted to pay for it, and I politely declined.

As I sort of implied, SHR’s family is extremely wealthy, and paying for Munchkin’s school wouldn’t be any kind of an imposition on him. But I didn’t really want to be a complete leech (I sort of got over that problem:-D) and kind of wanted to do this by myself. So I said no, and two days later he called me into his office and asked if I had thought about it any more and I said that I still appreciated the offer but couldn’t let him do that.

And then he yelled at me...hee hee. Now, I have heard him yell at people all the time, but never me. In fact, there are times at the office when everyone else will speak to him only through me because they are worried that he will bite their heads off, and they know that he won’t snap at me. But this one time he did; he told me that it was fine to be proud, but you had to know when to accept help, especially when it was on someone else’s behalf. So after a quick, stern talking-to, I knew he was right and I caved.

The school has been phenomenal. She loves it there, she does really well, her teachers all love her, and I really love the environment. The parents are all involved and stay in contact with each other, and they have been incredibly welcoming to both me and her. Really it has all been pretty perfect.

So the Smoking Hot Roommate story is about more than just her. It’s about her being my other half, and about her father being a friend and a Dad, and about her sister being the long lost older sister I never had. Big Sis sometimes introduces me and Munchkin as her sisters, which makes me feel kinda warm and fuzzy inside:-).

Like I said, she will be in virtually every post, so I figured I should give her a proper introduction.

3 comments:

Ohmygoodness...I've been so curious and wanting back story on all this and finally had time to peruse your blog and find out about it. Such an amazing story!!!!What wonderful people-- SHR and Papa Bear and her big sis! You sound pretty stellar yourself....way to be a hero. :)Munchkin is quite lucky, eh?

About Me

I'm 30, and without tooting my own horn, I am wicked cute:-)
I live in a fantastic condo in Boston with my adorable husband (since September of 2009), our twin girls (April, 2010) and my sort-of adopted 17 year old little sister. I am a recent graduate of a fancy-shmancy business school, and I benefit from a lot of fantastic people that treat me like family and give me a lot to be thankful for.
I also have an 12 year old half-sister in Chicago that I wish I saw more!
Stick around and I will tell you some stories:-D Most of them are pretty good, I promise!!!